Abbas said: “When you have put your requests on the table and you don’t get anything you’ve asked for, you have to start thinking about parting ways.”
It is notable that HBS has chosen to feature Salah’s contract renegotiation on its business of entertainment, media and sport programme, run by professor. She prepared the deep dive into the mechanics of the Salah deal with one of her students, Taher El Moataz Bellah; Abbas and Salah granted interviews.
The study includes Abbas’s take on the negotiations shortly before he made that counter-offer. “We are still very far apart. Mohamed isn’t going to throw away his contract because of a 5% difference in what we are asking for and what they are willing to give – it is much more than that.” “If we find a way to get Liverpool to agree to the salary we have in mind and if Mohamed performs at a level he has achieved in the past seasons …” Abbas says, “we conservatively expect the total amount received by Mohamed and the image rights companies over the next few years from both his playing contract and his image rights contracts to be somewhere between €54m [£46.8m] and €62m [£53.7m] per year.”The study ends with a quote from Salah.